TERRAFORMING TERRA
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Thursday, May 21, 2015

Mammoth Genomes Provide Recipe for Creating Arctic Elephants

We are definately getting closer to the reality of having resurrected Mammoths. I think that we may be ready in another eight to ten years or so. That is not so long to wait.

Once accomplished we will then see the whole Ice Age menagerie brought back quickly. From that base of experience, we will also see extensive resurrection of bird species world wide.

By the end of this century every biologist will have his private refugia under management to produce the formerly extinct.

Mammoth Genomes Provide Recipe for Creating Arctic Elephants

A catalog of the genetic differences between woolly mammoths and elephants reveals how the ice-age giants braved the cold

The first woolly mammoth genome was published in 2008, but it
contained too many errors to reliably distinguish how the mammoth genome
differs from those of elephants.

Unlike their elephant cousins, woolly mammoths were creatures of the
cold, with long hairy coats, thick layers of fat and small ears that
kept heat loss to a minimum. For the first time, scientists have
comprehensively catalogued the hundreds of genetic mutations that gave
rise to these differences.

The research reveals how woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) evolved from the ancestor they share with Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). It could even serve as a recipe for engineering elephants that are able to survive in Siberia.

“These are genes we would need to alter in an elephant genome to
create an animal that was mostly an elephant, but actually able to
survive somewhere cold,” says Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary geneticist
at the University of California, Santa Cruz who was not involved in the
latest research. As fanciful as it sounds, such an effort is at a very
early stage in a research lab in Boston, Massachusetts.

The first woolly mammoth genome was
published in 2008, but it contained too many errors to reliably
distinguish how the mammoth genome differs from those of elephants.
Other studies singled out individual mammoth genes for close inspection,
identifying mutations that would have endowed the animals with light
coats and oxygen-carrying haemoglobin proteins that work in the cold.

Fatty secrets

In the latest study, Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary geneticist at the
University of Chicago in Illinois, and his team describe how they
sequenced the genomes of three Asian elephants and two woolly mammoths
(one died 20,000 years ago, another 60,000 years ago) to a very high
quality. They found about 1.4 million DNA letters that differ between
mammoths and elephants, which altered the sequence of more than 1,600
protein-coding genes. The study was posted on the biology preprint
server bioRxiv.org on April 23.

Combing the literature for information about what those proteins do
in other organisms revealed dozens of genes implicated in skin and hair
development, fat storage and metabolism, temperature sensation and other
aspects of biology potentially relevant to life in the Arctic.

For instance, several of the genes with changes unique to the
mammoths were involved in setting the circadian clock, a potential
adaptation to living in a world with dark winters and 24 hours of
daylight in summer. Other Arctic animals such as some reindeer have
similar mutations.

The mammoth genomes also contained extra copies of a gene that
controls the production of fat cells and variations in genes linked to
insulin signalling, which are in turn linked to diabetes and diabetes
prevention. And several of the genes that differ between mammoths and
elephants are involved in sensing heat and transmitting that information
to the brain.

Resurrected gene

The team ‘resurrected’ the mammoth version of one of the heat-sensing
genes, which encodes a protein called TRPV3 that is expressed in skin
and also regulates hair growth. They inserted the gene sequence into the
genomes of human cells in the lab and exposed them to different
temperatures, revealing that the mammoth TRPV3 protein is less
responsive to heat than the elephant version is. The result chimes with a
previous finding that mice with a deactivated version of TRPV3 are more
likely to spend time in colder parts of their cage compared with normal
rodents, and boast wavier hair.

The next step, says Lynch, is to insert the same gene into elephant
cells that have been chemically programmed to behave like embryonic
cells, and so can be turned into a variety of cell types. Such induced
pluripotent stem (iPS) cells could then be used to examine expression of
mammoth proteins in different tissues. Lynch's team also plans to test
the effects of other mammoth mutations in iPS cells.

Mammoth task

Similar work is already being carried out in the lab of George Church, a
geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Using a technology known as CRISPR/Cas9 that allows genes to be easily edited,
his team claims to have engineered elephant cells that contain the
mammoth version of 14 genes potentially involved in cold
tolerance—although the team has not yet tested how this affects the
elephant cells. Church plans to do these experiments in “organoids”
created from elephant iPS cells.

The work, says Church, is a preamble to editing an entire woolly
mammoth genome—and perhaps even resurrecting the woolly mammoth, or at
least giving an Asian elephant enough mammoth genes to survive in the
Arctic. The second option would be easier to do because it would require
fewer mutations than the first option. A 16-square-kilometre reserve in
north Siberia, known as Pleistocene Park, has even been proposed as a
potential home for such a population of cold-tolerant elephants.

However, whether anyone would want to do such a thing is a different question, says Lynch, and Shapiro agrees. In her book How to Clone a Mammoth (Princeton
University Press, 2015), she outlines the innumerable hurdles that
stand in the way of breeding genetically modified ‘woolly
elephants’—from the ethics of applying reproductive technologies to an
endangered species to the fact that the field of elephant reproductive
biology is still immature.

“I probably should have called the book How One Might Go About
Cloning a Mammoth (Should It Become Technically Possible, And If It
Were, In Fact, a Good Idea, Which It's Probably Not),” Shapiro says. “But that was a much less compelling title.”

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Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.